Sunday, February 17, 2013

Progress photos - interior painting

We've made lots of progress on the house over the past 3-4 weeks. Our painter came and finished up the interior. It took several weeks and then we had some issues with our cabinets (more on that in a moment).

The painters spent several days prepping the area with masking, paper and diligently covering the flooring and windows.

Great room built in bookshelf

View of the kitchen from the great room

Foyer dormer

Prepping the box newels

In writing this blog, I've been careful not to complain or focus on the negatives of building a custom home (and trust me, there have been many moments where I've wondered what we've gotten ourselves into). Yet there's one issue that we couldn't ignore: the cabinets. We used a custom cabinet maker that our builder had used before. He strongly recommended and vetted his work. With this suggestion, we trusted our builder. But let me make a very important statement:

If your gut is telling you that a particular subcontractor is sort of a weirdo, don't discount that.

Had I trusted my gut, instead of our builder, we would have been in much better shape with cabinetry and our budget. I'm still kicking myself for not trusting my gut, as I always do, but it is what it is...

Our cabinets were delivered and according to our contract, they were supposed to be "painted, finish grade." What we received were cabinets with wood showing through what appeared to be primer. After many weeks of the cabinet guy being incommunicado, we felt as though we had no other choice but to hire our painter to remove all of the cabinet doors and drawers, and spray them into finished grade. If you're wondering, it was approximately $4,000 to have all of our cabinets repainted.

Cabinets stacked in the garage

Bare wood = not good

Aside from the cabinet debacle, the rest of the interior painting went really well.

Great room fireplace

Great room

Interior doors

Master bedroom fireplace

After the cabinets were repainted, and installed for the second time, we noticed that many of the doors were warped. You might be wondering whether or not the repainting of the cabinets caused the warping. Here's what I can tell you: we have stained cabinets in the guest bathroom that were also severely warped. These doors were delivered in that condition and were never removed or retouched.

As you can see below, I marked all of the doors with blue tape. When we threatened to withhold payment from incommunicado weirdo cabinet maker, he was suddenly willing and able to rectify the cabinet situation. We now have new doors that are ready to be installed by our finish carpenter. Suffice to say, it's amazing that I didn't end up committed after dealing with this particular guy.